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India After Gandhi

Page 102

by Ramachandra Guha


  75

  Letters to ‘R’ dated 8December 1956, in File 46, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  76

  Sir Charles Bell, quoted in Dorothy Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1969) p. 179. Woodman’s book remains the best historical account of the origins of the border dispute between India and China. But see also Hsiao-Ting Lin, ‘Boundary, Sovereignty, and Imagination: Reconsidering the Frontier Disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914–47’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004.

  77

  On Elwin, the IFAS and their work in NEFA, see Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapter 11.

  78

  Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers, p. 66.

  79

  ‘Indo-Pakistan Clash of Ideologies’, Times of India, 26 January 1952.

  80

  Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 82–8; Gargi Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005), pp. 15–25.

  81

  I have simplified and summarized a complex story told in detail in A. A. Michel, The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

  82

  See J. B. Das Gupta, Indo-Pakistan Relations, 1947–1955 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958), pp. 51–2.

  83

  ‘Feelings in the Capital about the Trade Pact with Pakistan’, unsigned note dated 28 February 1951, in File 61, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML. A year before this, when Nehru signed his agreement with Liaqat Ali Khan, a critic complained that he ‘represents the beatific school which believes in self-flagellation in reconciliation [with] the enemy’.'Shridharani from New Delhi’, the Current, 12 April 1950.

  84

  Dawn, 19, 24, 25 and 28 January 1955.

  85

  N. V. Rajkumar, The Problem of French India (New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee, 1951); Governor of Madras to President of India, 16 April 1954, in File215, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML; Dawn,27 January 1955.

  86

  Times of India, 2 November 1955.

  87

  As quoted in Goa and the Indian Union (Lisbon: Secretariado Nacional Da Informacao, 1954).

  88

  See Portuguese India: A Survey of Conditions After 400 Years of Foreign Colonial Rule (Bombay: Goa Congress Committee, 1939); Julião Menezes, Goa’s Freedom Struggle (Bombay: privately published, 1947).

  89

  R. M. Lala, ‘Report on Daman’, the Current, 22 November 1950.

  90

  Aloysius Soares, Down the Corridors of Time: Recollections and Reflexions, vol. 2: 1948–70 (Bombay: privately published, 1973), pp. 45ff.; the Current, 25 August 1954.

  91

  Homer A. Jack, Inside Goa (New Delhi: Information Service of India, 1955); P. D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1987).

  92

  Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 18–19.

  93

  Letter of 22 January 1953, in Nehru correspondence, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.

  94

  C. Rajagopalachari to Edwina Mountbatten, 5 September 1950, File 189, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  95

  See Carlo Feltrinelli, Secret Service (London: Granta Books, 2002).

  96

  Bok, Alva Myrdal, p. 243.

  9. REDRAWING THE MAP

  1

  CWMG, vol. 89, pp. 312–13.

  2

  ‘The Question of Language’ (1937), in Nehru, The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937–1940 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1941), pp. 232–3.

  3

  Quoted in Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 102.

  4

  CWMG, vol. 90, p. 86.

  5

  Ibid., p. 494.

  6

  See letter of 8June 1948 to Tushar Kanti Ghosh, in Subject File82, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  7

  Report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission (New Delhi: Constituent Assembly of India, 1948), paras 146 and 147.

  8

  King, Nehru and Language Politics, pp. 107, 108.

  9

  See Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), chapters 2 and 3.

  10

  Satindra Singh, ‘Master Tara Singh: A Born Rebel’, Thought, 9 December 1967.

  11

  Nayar, Minority Politics, p. 143.

  12

  Quoted ibid., p. 36.

  13

  The best account of the history of the Andhra movement, on which the preceding paragraphs largely draw, is K. V. Narayana Rao’s The Emergence of Andhra Pradesh (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973).

  14

  The Current, 2 January 1952. See also Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 234–5.

  15

  Congress Sandesh, quoted in Narayana Rao, Emergence of Andhra Pradesh, p. 241.

  16

  See Times ofIndia, 24 February 1952.

  17

  See ‘Kowshika’, The Boundaries of Andhra Province (Pudukottai: Anbu Nilayam, 1947).

  18

  Narayana Rao, Emergence of Andhra Pradesh, p. 243.

  19

  History of Andhra Movement, vol. 2 (Hyderabad: Committee for History of Andhra Movement, 1985), p. 496.

  20

  Gandhi to T. Prakasam, 4 January 1947, in History of Andhra Movement, pp. 496–7; also CWMG, vol. 86, p. 242.

  21

  Interview with Professor Béteille, New Delhi, December 2001.

  22

  See Subject File 123, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  23

  Cf. P. R. Rao, History of Modern Andhra (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1984), p. 130.

  24

  Letter of 18 August 1953 to General Sir Roy Bucher, Subject File124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  25

  S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), p. 259.

  26

  Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganization Commission (Bombay: Bombay Citizens Committee, 1954).

  27

  The activities of the Committee, including its strategies for fund-raising and public relations, can be followed through the massive material contained in File 383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  28

  M. S. Golwalkar, quoted in Times of India, 8 November1951.

  29

  Times of India, 24 May 1954.

  30

  Gadgil and Deshmukh are both quoted in Robert W. Stein, The Process of Opposition in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 46.

  31

  Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad, ‘Memorandum to the States Reorganization Committee’, May 1954, copy in the library of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Puné. D.R. Gadgil was the chief draughtsman of this memorandum.

  32

  See report of meeting of 20 June 1954 in File383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  33

  This section is based on Report of the States Reorganization Commission (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1955).

  34

  See Lok Sabha Debates, vol. X, 1955.

  35

  The Current, 4 January 1956.

  36

  The change of name was affected towards the end of 1955.

  37

  Taya Zinkin, Reporting India (London: Chatto and Windus,1962), p. 108.

  38

  The Current, 25 January 1956.
See also V. M. Bhave, ‘Struggle for Maharashtra’, New Age, September 1956.

  39

  Letter of 23 January 1956, Subject File68, C. D. Deshmukh Papers, NMML.

  40

  See papers in Subject File 67, C. D. Deshmukh Papers, NMML.

  41

  See letters and papers in Subject File 4, N. V. Gadgil Papers, NMML.

  42

  As reported in alarm to the Home Minister, G. B. Pant, by Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas. See letter of 20 January 1956, in File 383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  43

  The Current, 15 and 29 February 1956.

  44

  Y. D. Phadke, Politics and Language (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1979), chapter 6.

  45

  See Baburao Patel, Burning Words: A Critical History of Nine Years of Nehru’s Rule from 1947 to 1956 (Bombay: Sumati Publications, 1956), pp. 106–8.

  46

  Ravi Kalia, Bhubaneshwar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).

  47

  Janaki Nair, ‘"Past Perfect”: Architecture and Public Life in Bangalore’. I am grateful to Dr Nair for showing me a copy of this ms prior to its publication in her history of Bangalore, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  48

  Times of India, 26 February 1952.

  49

  ‘Andhra Answers Dulles’, Economic Weekly, 5 March 1955.

  10. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE

  1

  W. Burns, ed., Sons of the Soil: Studies of the Indian Cultivator, 2nd edn (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), introduction.

  2

  Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of their Relations until Zamindari Abolition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  3

  Chitra Bhanu, ‘Food Situation Getting Worse in Malabar’, Swatantra, 29 July 1947.

  4

  See, for illuminating contemporary analyses, Z. A. Ahmad, The Agrarian Problem in India: A General Survey (Allahabad: All-India Congress Committee, 1936); S. Y. Krishnaswami, Rural Problems in Madras (Madras: Government of Madras, 1947). Valuable surveys of the economic history of colonial India include V. B. Singh, ed., Economic History of India: 1857–1956 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1965); Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c. 1757–c. 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Tirthankar Ray, The Indian Economy, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  5

  See, inter alia, Dwijendra Tripathi, ed., Business and Politics in India: A Historical Perspective (Delhi: Manohar, 1991); Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  6

  J. K. Galbraith, ‘Rival Economic Theories in India’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 36, no. 4, 1958, p. 591.

  7

  See Meghnad Saha, ‘The Problem of Indian Rivers’ (1938) and ‘Technological Revolution in Industry – How the Russians Did It’ (1943), both in Santimay Chatterjee, ed., Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, vol. 2 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1986).

  8

  LajpatRai, The Evolution of Japan and Other Papers (Calcutta: Modern Review, 1922).

  9

  K. T. Shah, ‘Principles of National Planning’, in Iqbal Singh and Raja Rao, eds, Whither India? (Baroda: Padmaja Publications, 1948). Shah was a Bombay economist who served as Secretary of the NPC. See also R. Chattopadhyay, ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985.

  10

  See, for example, National Planning Committee: Report oftheSub-Committeeon Power and Fuel (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1949).

  11

  Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (Parts One and Two) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), emphases added. The signatories to the Bombay Plan included G. D. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Lala Shri Ram, J. R. D. Tata, and Purushottamdas Thakurdas.

  12

  The intellectual climate of the time, as it pertained to economic policy, is captured in Tirthankar Ray, ‘Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 16, no. 3, 2002; Nariaki Nakatozo, ‘The Transfer of Economic Power in India: Indian Big Business, the British Raj and Development Planning, 1930–1948’, in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakatozo, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation-Building in South Asia (Delhi: Manohar, 2001); Pranab Bardhan, ‘A Note on Nehru as Economic Planner’, in Milton Israel, ed., Nehru and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

  13

  Speech in Lok Sabha on 15 December 1952, in Planning and Development: Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru (1952–56) (New Delhi: Publications Division, n.d.), pp. 7–8. See also R. Ramadas, ‘Report on the Draft Five-Year Plan’, Swatantra, 1 December 1951.

  14

  See Times of India, 4 November 1954.

  15

  Cf. A. H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 111–20.

  16

  Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 83. Mahalanobis was an intimate of Rabindranath Tagore – it was said that he had a better knowledge of Tagore’s poems and plays than did the poet himself.

  17

  See, for details, Ashok Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  18

  This and the following two paragraphs draw upon Mahalanobis’s letters to Pitambar Pant, June–July 1954, Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML. See also Khilnani, Idea of India, pp. 83f.

  19

  Mahalanobis wrote that he was ‘in favour of seeking the help of both USA and USSR (and of the UK and other countries) in developing the industrial production of India’ (letter of 7 July 1954, in Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML). He was in this respect genuinely non-partisan. In the years to come his ISI played host to top economists from both sides of the Iron Curtain – to men such as Simon Kuznets, Oskar Lange, Charles Bettelheim, Jan Tinbergen and many, many others. For details see Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, chapter 14.

  20

  ‘Recommendations for the Formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan’, and ‘The Approach of Operational Research to Planning in India’, both written in 1955, both reprinted in P. K. Bose and M. Mukherjee, eds, P. C. Mahalanobis: Papers on Planning (Calcutta: Statistical Publishing Society, 1985). Along with these narrative papers, Mahalanobis also framed two mathematical models of economic growth. These are discussed in T. N. Srinivasan, ‘Professor Mahalanobis and Economics’, printed as chapter 11 in Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

  21

  Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 128–30. See also K. N. Raj, ‘Model-Making and the Second Plan’, Economic Weekly, 26 January 1956.

  22

  Government of India, The Second Five-Year Plan (New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1956), p. 6.

  23

  P. C. Mahalanobis, ‘Draft Plan Frame for the Second Five-Year Plan’, Economic Weekly, special issue, 18 June 1955.

  24

  Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 459–62.

  25

  Haldane to Mahalanobis, 16 May 1955, quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 194—1956 (London: Cape), pp. 305–6.

  26

  Letter of 22 December 1952, in Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers, edited by G. Parthasarathi, 5 vols (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985–9) hereafter cited as LCM, vol. 3, pp. 205–7.

  27

  Letter of 22 December 1952, LCM, vol. 3, p. 205; letter of 14 February 1956, LCM, vol. 4, p. 346.

  28

  Letter of 13 January 195
5, LCM, vol. 4, p. 123.

  29

  ‘Triangular Contest for Steel Plant’, Economic Weekly, 19 December 1953; Taya Zinkin, Challenges in India (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), chapter 7.

  30

  The friend was Joe Miller, the late and legendary librarian of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

  31

  See Subject File 5, K. P. S. Menon Papers, NMML.

  32

  Ved Mehta, Portrait of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), pp. 285–97.

  33

  S. Bhoothalingam, ‘Rourkela Steel Plant’, Indian Review, April 1956.

  34

  For example Meghnad Saha, My Experiences in Soviet Russia (Calcutta: publisher unknown, 1945); K. L. Rao, Cusecs and Candidates: Memoirs of an Engineer (New Delhi: Metropolitan, 1978).

  35

  Daniel Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Thousand: America, India and the World in the Image of the Tennessee Valley Authority,1945–1970’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1999, p. 228.

  36

  A. N. Khosla to C. Rajagopalachari, 30 August 1953, in Subject File124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  37

  Henry C. Hart, New India’s Rivers (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1956), pp. 97–100.

  38

  ‘India Marches on: Bhakra-Nangal Project’, MysIndia, 28 November 1954. Much smaller was the complementary Nangal project, a low concrete dam located eight miles downstream of the Bhakra.

  39

  Indian Journal of Power and RiverValley Development, Bhakra–Nangal special issue, 1956.

  40

  This portrait of Slocum is based on J. D. Sahi, Odd Man Out: Exploits of a Crazy Idealist (New Delhi: Gitanjai Publishing House, 1991), pp. 55–69,133; M. S. Randhawa, A History of Agriculture in India, vol. 4: 1947–1981 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1986), pp. 92–3.

  41

  Hart, New India’s Rivers, p. 225; report in the Current, 14 July 1954.

  42

  Obaid Siddiqi, Science, Society, Government and Politics: Some Remarks on the Ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru, Zaheer Memorial Lecture, Indian Science Congress, Cochin, February 1990.

  43

  See Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science: The Making of an Industrial Research Laboratory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  44

  On Bhabha see Robert S. Anderson, ‘Building Scientific Institutions in India: Saha and Bhabha’, Occasional Paper, Centre for Developing-Area Studies, McGill University, 1975.

 

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